Strategic Planning – Business Skill #5 To Take Your Business To The Next Level

Strategic planning is one of the key skills an entrepreneur needs to have mastered in order to be successful in business.

In a previous video, I talked about the 8 main skills an entrepreneur needs.

This is number 5 on that list of 8 skills.

Why Is Strategic Planning So Important?

The main reason is that the entrepreneur is the business owner and they are the key decision-maker in the business. So if they’re not making decisions and doing strategic planning, nobody is!

So often an entrepreneur gets stuck in the day-to-day grind, and they’re focused mostly on just surviving each day, as opposed to thinking about “Where am I trying to get head today? Is getting a successful day completed, also moving me towards this ideal future I’m trying to live out?”

Have you defined the future you want?

Have you think thought about…

• Some of the steps headed in that direction
• Some of the obstacles to overcome
• What the limiting factors are
• The actions to take
• What you need to learn…

If you haven’t evaluated that information, your chances of just stumbling there is almost zero.

The Job Of CEO

I find that a lot of entrepreneurs don’t really know what a CEO is supposed to do.

The job of a CEO is

• To have a vision of where the company should be going
• And to be the decision-making factory.

Decisions come to the CEO they have to pick out “Do we do this, or that? What do we do?”

Each decision that doesn’t get made becomes a traffic jam of decisions. And now the company can halt and the entire organization can come to a standstill.

The clearer the vision is, the easier decisions are, and the less likely the CEO is to get bound up and stuck.

Having a clearer picture is really, really important.

The Main Obstacle To Setting A Goal For Strategic Planning

So why don’t more entrepreneurs do this?

Well, number one is they don’t have the knowledge.

1. It is my clear understanding that first, you have to have knowledge to know HOW to work on a skill.
2. You have to have the beginning knowledge of the concepts around the application of the skill itself to be able to develop the skill. (I previously talked more about learning a skill in this post)

Knowing How

So the knowledge of how to develop a strategic plan is the first part.

Many people are actually too afraid to do strategic planning because that’s in line with setting a goal.

They figure if they don’t set a goal, they “don’t fail.”

Well actually, if you don’t set a goal you just fail every day! Sure you can act like you don’t know that’s true.

If you set a goal at least you have clear steps to take towards that.

So not setting a goal is not a very good option.

Defining Success For Strategic Planning

What is the meaning of success? What is the definition of success?

I like Earl Nightingale’s definition, which is “success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal or goal.”

Since it’s the “progressive realization” it doesn’t happen overnight.

It’s the individual steps that you take towards a worthy ideal or goal – of someplace you actually want to be.

The goal isn’t to be “efficient” and just do a lot of things in a day. It is to be “effective”, meaning we’re doing things in a day that move us towards the desired goal.

If we’re just “surviving each day” and doing a lot of work turning a lot of billable hours but those aren’t moving us from where we are now towards the goal in any way shape or form, that day was actually a failure.

Balancing “Doing” and “Thinking”

Now, usually moving towards our goal does require us to be earning money so we can stay in business. So I’m not saying you should stop doing the work and just do the thinking sitting in your room and imagining how nice the future be if you were a billionaire.

But there’s a combination of the two that has to happen. It’s so easy for the owner, to just dive into doing the work because that’s what you’re comfortable with.

We may think “That’s what I know best is how to do the work. I’m not the master of strategic planning,” but it’s important to become the piece doing both.

Because if you’re not clocking in for the strategic planning time, nobody is.

It will take you time to remain sitting in a room with a notepad and think. Maybe you have a session where nothing comes up. You sat and you thought and the end result is nothing… It feels like a waste of time.

Well, it might take a few of those “nothing” sessions to stack up to get a better vision or an idea of what needs to happen going forward.

Creating A Strategic Roadmap To Be Succesful

I think of a roadmap for a strategic plan as,

• Where are you now?
• Where is it that you’d like to be? Where’s your goal?
• Where are you currently headed?

Usually, we’re not actually headed towards our goal and between where we are and where the goal is, versus where we’re headed there’s a gap.

Within that gap, there are specific actions that we need to take to move from where we’re headed to where we’d like to be.

Usually just doing the same thing doesn’t get us there.

Also, there are some limitations we must overcome to get there.

That can be

• lack of knowledge,
• lack of resources,
• lack of mentorship,
• lack of ideas,
• lack of implementation,

Those limitations must be overcome and extra actions must be taken in order to achieve success.

Basically, think as if you are in a boat headed in the wrong direction. You’re not going to be able to just decide to go a different way you have to put a lot of force into changing the direction of that boat.

So redirecting your momentum for the purposes of your roadmap is really, really important.

The Second Most Common Mistake Entrepreneurs Make In Strategic Planning When Setting Goals

Another common thing I see business owners do besides the first mistake (which was they don’t set a goal at all).

The second mistake is that they set goals that are different every single day and in totally different directions.

So one day, they want to be a service-based business. Then the next day they want to be a product-based business. Then the next day they want lots of employees and then they decide they want to have a business by themselves instead.

Because they change each of these goals so fast they never get to progress towards them and have any success.

This type of way of being it’s kind of like a dog in the backyard trying to chase all of the squirrels at once. They’ll never catch any they’ll just spin in circles and bark themselves silly.

You have to pick out a singular goal and stay with it. Keep staying with it long enough to have a chance to work.

When To Pivot?

There can be a time when you can decide this goal isn’t realistic, but I’ve chased it as far as I can. With that new knowledge. It’s time to pivot and adapt.

But if you’re non-stop pivoting, that’s just another way to protect yourself from failure and not actually serving you.

Just like not setting any goals whatsoever is protecting your ego and your emotions but not actually serving you at business.

So strategic planning is the 5th of the 8 really key skills in business is going to be a hard one to work on.

I’d love to help you out.

If you have questions about that let me know in the comments.

Have a wonderful rest of your day.